never even ever ever even ever ever ends

This could be it. I have exactly two hours of classroom-continuum remaining until all of my achievements in this school's technical calculus battery are summed, and I am ranked. The topic of neverending math equations here at /#blog may end (or converge absolutely).

I think back to advanced chemistry my senior year in high school and our introduction to Casio scientific calculators. My lab partner received a great deal of joy by organizing a table of all the sine, cosine and tangent functions of the number 69, then instructing others on the slack-off side of the room to take the inverse function of the decimal values. Sure enough, '69' popped up on the LCD. Switching to hexadecimal mode, letters 'A' through 'F' were accessed, and decimal number 2645 was added to the table with instructions to swap base modes. This yields A55. Still, it bothered him that he had no way to generate the number 311. He was leading the running joke about this number, jesting an intense fascination with the rap-rock forerunners. But inverse trigonometric functions will only return up to 180 degree readings.

Finally, I'm taught something useful by a math teacher. This is, of course, also in jest, but I did learn a function recently that will create a division problem from a repeating decimal. Just as 0.3333, repeating infinitely converges to 1/3, the number 0.69696969... can be attained by dividing 23 by 33. To get 0.311311311311... one need only divide 311 by 999. Or, of course, 140/333 = 0.420420420... It works for any number of obsession and by priciples of infinite series.

It may have been nice to have this knowledge in my fourth year of high school to entertain the imaginations of my chemistry class and myself, but I'm sure it will be nicer to know it, and all else I've absorbed, entering into the advanced electronics classes to come. Although, imagine what I might be capable of in the parlor because of higher mathematical education. On several occasions at a restaurant beknown to many beknown to me, I realized one large soda and one basket of fries tallies up to $3.14. I gripe at the check "I didn't order pi."

s.o.m.e. school in the midwest

In appendage to the previous post, I was learned in the ways of 'squirrel cages' today. They happen to be a main piece of hardware found in induction motors.

transformers are not robots

Being MIA on AIM, the popular realtime Internet correspondence software, I am living a hermitic existence at this University. Education-based conversation is mostly what I initiate in encounters with acquaintances, and I'm becoming more conscious of it than when focusing the topic on myself.

Not minding lack of accompaniment in ventures away from campus, I often forget to poll the other dorms for someone also wanting to breathe sub-freezing air in search of a super-boiling beverage. I speak of a lone three-block jaunt to Starbucks, just a day ago. The franchise of which I'm a patron, and affront by doing my best to avoid learning all their cup-size lingo, is built into a hill in the financial district of the north downtown area, has an ice skating rink that doubles as a patio in the warmer, less hermitic, months, and sports a gas fireplace. Starbucks has been trashed everywhere from in the 'real-life' comic strips to bohemian coffee shop wall-poetry. Although this urban professionals' haunt is a bloated plasticine Norman Rockwell panorama, their cup of hot chocolate is a work of engineering.

Pressure steamed chocolate 'espresso' is whistled into a steel cup and mixed with a room-temperature dairy product that falls out of its pitcher rather than pours by its untouched milkfat percentage. Some fluffy white aerosol foam is added to the brim, and capped with a standard 'sippy' cover. One might debate with oneself over purchasing a pastry from the rack or read the first few sentences of the New York Times cover story until the whirring and gurgling of the drink's production settles down. But, I watched it all come together. Skeptical of the temperature-ratio to constituent-ratio... ratio, I suspected it may have turned out luke-warm. As it actually turned out, the first 4 sips gave the esophagus's inverse of an ice cream headache, and the rest were like swallowing from a bucket of down feathers. There was also a touch of fluff in every pull.

As simple as brown antifreeze on a blustery city night is, the science reminded me on which end of the timeline of progress I stood. The processes in refineries to give a city bus its usual drink as opposed to that of an automobile or passenger jet came to mind. Just as the heating and separation of crude oil is called 'cracking' and microwaving a burger at Hardee's is called 'boosting,' there is little doubt mixing cream with molten chocolate in the setting of a standardized service has a slightly silly nickname of a multi-meaning verb, like 'creaming.'

Since school comes to mind often with society on hold on line 2, I have at my fingertips technical and mathematical terminology synonymous with words more readily grasped in their traditional (or even slang) contexts. Some truly uncanny ones stem from working with electronics, my growing expertise. When describing some devices, they may be self-excited or separately-excited. To stop one of these devices, one may want to implement a method called 'plugging.' Amongst technicians, suggestive references are sometimes assigned intentionally. I was hipped that a power meter that 'clamps on' to a wire is sometimes called a 'strap-on.' "It's a matter of preference," he said.

The communications industry as well as technology in general would be wise to invest in Webster's New World. Words like 'server' and 'domain' if put on flashcards would probably yield different associative words than before the advent. Looking into a computer, hard drives must be configured in a 'master-slave' relationship. This may illustrate the furthest we've come in redefinition.

New ideas are only describable in old terms. Eventually terms may pile on top of one another as waves of technological evolution carry on. The first ever cup of hot chocolate may have been 'lumpy,' but reading in a recent science journal, apparently the universe hasn't always been, nor will continue to become any more 'lumpy.' I've got a laboratory session scheduled tomorrow. I'm sure it will be an unpredictable world of 'banana plugs' and 'alligator clips'